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Facebook vs. Adblock Plus: Just By Fighting, Facebook Wins

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On Tuesday this week, Facebook made waves by breaking ad blockers, implementing technology to show ads to people who are using ad blocking technology in their desktop browsers. Within two days the open source ad-blocking community had found a way to defeat Facebook's technology, and re-enabled ad blocking on the social media giant's website.

And so the arms race began.

 Facebook found a way to re-enable the block, Adblock Plus found a way to re-un-enable the block, and tit followed tat, with fight leading to farce. The result? This genius headline from The Register: "Adblock Plus blocks Facebook block of Adblock Plus block of Facebook block of AdBlock Plus block of Facebook ads."

This is not a recipe for Adblock Plus customer satisfaction.

Facebook will win

The effort by the ad blocking community is irrelevant. Wherever this goes, and however long it lasts, as long as Facebook maintains the battle, it wins. It's simply a matter of resources ... and human nature.

As my research has shown, 25 percent of people have installed ad blocking technology on mobile. The IAB says an almost similar number have done so on desktop browsers.

But most of them are not extremely technical users; they're simply people who want to surf the web faster, avoid obnoxious ads, inhibit the ability of ad networks and marketers to track their footprints all over the digital universe, and, yes, not see ads.

I know that because I studied ad blocking and privacy behavior for TUNE (full disclosure: I work for TUNE). The data included 1.3 billion app installs by about 150 million people. Only 11.5 percent of iOS and 19.6 percent of Android users enable Limit Ad Tracking (LAT), a setting that limits what data advertisers can collect and use about you.

Why?

LAT is a more powerful way to protect privacy than ad blocking, because most of our digital activity is happening on mobile now, and ad blocking is largely ineffective on mobile where we use apps much more than mobile web.

The problem is that it's a little-known setting buried in your phone's preferences, and only fairly technical people are even aware of it. Average Jen? She's never heard of it.

Collateral damage

Add it all up, and you have a high percentage of people who are using ad blocking technology on desktop as well as mobile who are not super-technical. When this group of people runs into the tit-for-tat arms race that Facebook and the ad blocking community are now engaged in, they become the collateral damage.

As Facebook implements a technical change, the average ad-blocking Joe notices AdBlock Plus is not working. AdBlock Plus reverse-engineers the change, implements a counter-fix, and publishes, it, asking its users to update their filters, and Joe's software is again working as expected.

Until, of course, Facebook counters again. And again. And again.

As long as Facebook keeps fighting, it wins. Facebook has enough resources to fight this land war in Aisa for a very, very long time. Longer than AdBlock Plus, to be sure, but more importantly, longer than Average Jen's patience. Average ad-blocking Joe's copy of Adblock Plus is never fully up-to-date, never fully working, always requiring some kind of fix or update that may require manual intervention.

After enough of this, Average Joe and Average Jen give up. And Facebooks wins ... just by fighting.

As every gambler knows, you can't beat the house.

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